Taken from Roger Ebert's website. From the website: It's not my idea of The Best Movies Ever Made...These are the movies I just kind of figure everybody ought to have seen in order to have any sort of informed discussion about movies. They're the common cultural currency of our time, the basic cinematic texts that everyone should know, at minimum, to be somewhat "movie-literate."

Yeah. The Problem with this kind of strict lists of film "that you absolutely have to see to see or you don't know anything about movies" is that even the greatest film enthusiast that has seen thousands or tens of thousands of films might not have seen a number of well known films generally considered classics for whatever reason. And it would be quite ridiculous to say to someone like that that he has no right to take part in a meaningful discussion about films.

Anyway, I've seen 93 of these and own the rest, except for La Dolce Vita which I obviously am very eager to see, but have never gotten around to buying thanks to poor availability of good DVD releases.